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Bengt, 80, left for a week with broken neck

The Local Sweden
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Bengt, 80, left for a week with broken neck

An 80-year-old man was left lying in bed for a week with a broken neck at a care home in western Sweden after his care assistants failed to notice that anything was amiss.

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The man, Bengt Rosengren, fell while trying to use his wheeled walking frame at a care home in Lerum, roughly 20 kilometres east of Gothenburg in western Sweden.

It wasn’t until the man’s partner came to visit him to celebrate the Midsummer holiday that the severity of the man’s injuries was noticed.

“His face was as pale as a corpse, his eyes were crossed and he fainted when he tried to get up,” she told the Göteborgs-Posten (GP) newspaper.

“I rang the ambulance immediately.”

The fall one week previously had fractured several bones in the man’s cervical vertebrae, which are located immediately below the base of the skull.

At the time, care staff had enlisted the help of a nearby window cleaner to get the man back into his bed, but no further examinations were taken.

He then didn’t move from his bed for a week, with his personal care assistants not realizing that he was seriously injured.

Rosengren confessed that he can’t remember anything from the week he spent confined in bed, wrote the paper.

The Lerum municipality is planning to report the matter to the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen).

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